Shaban Athuman/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP
Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) smiles during her re-election speech, Tuesday, November 8, 2022, in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
How do you define a political party? By its platforms? Its legislative record? Its demographics? Its standard-bearers?
Last week, the Center for Working-Class Politics, in conjunction with Jacobin and Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, released a remarkable survey that went about answering this question in a way I hadn’t seen before. They looked at all the 966 Democratic candidates for federal office (the House and the Senate) who ran in the 2022 midterm elections (primaries as well as the November generals), reading all their websites and records of their talks to see the themes, the platforms, and the words themselves that the candidates used. With that dataset, they were able to chart how many ran as economic populists and progressives and how many chose not to. They were able to see how many aligned themselves in any way with the cultural left that to many Americans is what comes to mind when they think of the Democratic Party. And they then charted how well those candidates did in the elections, both overall and broken down by the characteristics of the districts and states where they’d run (competitive and not, heavily working-class or not, racial composition, and so on).
In short, they provided a pretty fair road map to the actually existing Democratic Party. And they provided some suggestions to a party that has lost the support of much of its former working-class base.
“How did progressives, populists, and working-class candidates fare when they did run?” the authors asked.
Candidates who used economic populist rhetoric won higher vote shares in general elections, especially in highly working-class districts, rural and small-town districts, and districts where the majority were white and not college-educated. We also find that Democratic candidates running on economically progressive policies were more successful overall than other candidates, especially in majority-white, non-college-educated districts.
That said, while the boost to candidates who ran as economic populists was real, it was hardly overwhelming. While the advantage to many Democrats who ran stressing such issues as stopping offshoring and outsourcing, building infrastructure and resurrecting manufacturing, was palpable, it was only in some subsets of districts that they made a difference. In predominantly white working-class districts, Democrats who didn’t stress such concerns in the November runoffs barely won 35 percent of the vote, while those who did got just under 50 percent. A similar set of vote shares existed in predominantly rural and small-town districts.
In those competitive districts where Democrats are weakest, in other words, campaigning as economic populists offers a measurable boost. In other districts, not so much. Indeed, the vote share for those populist Democrats who ran in other kinds of competitive districts—those with fewer working-class voters—fell short of the shares won by Democrats who eschewed the neo–New Deal themes that Bernie Sanders and, increasingly, President Biden invoke.
But the real story of this survey comes further down in its text. In journalese, this is called “burying the lede”—that is, in this case, only getting to what should be the headline material in this poll on page 13. There, the authors present the data on just how many of these nearly 1,000 candidates, spanning all types of districts and ideologies, invoked the themes and language of the cultural left.
To no one’s surprise, a hefty majority of Democratic candidates devoted their attention to the issue of abortion and the right to choose. About one-quarter of them raised issues relating to gays and lesbians, and a little more than 10 percent those relating to undocumented immigrants.
But on the other 40 topics that to many Americans define today’s Democratic Party—ranging from reparations and defunding the police to open borders and gender identity—the share of Democratic candidates who had so much as a word to say averaged under 5 percent, and for a number of these issues, was a flat zero.
Which raises a rather important question: How has the Democratic Party come to be defined by issues and concerns that its candidates and officeholders don’t even talk about? How have the Democrats become identified with positions they don’t hold?
These are not questions that this survey attempts to answer, which doesn’t mean the answers aren’t apparent. For one, it’s fair to say that the primary purpose of right-wing media, ranging from Fox News to blogging nutcase influencers (which isn’t that much of a range at all), has long been to identify the Democrats with marginal positions espoused by some on the left, even (or especially) if those marginalistas have never run for office or even registered as Democrats.
In a sense, the right’s identification of Democrats with the cultural left is the right’s post–Cold War version of their Cold War identification of Democrats and liberals with communists. It was right after the Soviet Union collapsed that the right’s savviest strategists—Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich in particular—understood the need to identify some other menace to hearth and home, and refocused their attention on gays, lesbians, and the academy. (Blacks, of course, had been a perennial menace and immigrants a cyclical one, but the right still needed an overarching demonic force, which the cultural left, if sufficiently magnified by right-wing media, had potential to provide.)
Just as the new survey data debunks the right’s characterization of the Democrats, it also poses something of a challenge to those Democratic pundits who insist the Democrats’ weakness among working-class voters can only be remedied by repudiating their cultural radicalism. Problem is, in the vast majority of cases, that cultural radicalism isn’t something they actually espouse or even allude to. In their newish book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, authors Ruy Teixeira and John Judis oscillate between excoriating what they term “the shadow party”—think tanks, NGOs, interest groups, and a growing share of corporate media and even major business interests that are a part of the broad, semi-wokish center-left world—and the Democratic Party per se for their romance, real or imagined, with the cultural left. Quite rightly, they attribute much of the working-class flight from the Democrats to the party’s support for offshoring, deregulation, and financialization under the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
But a reader of their work—particularly of Teixeira’s most recent 1,200 columns, which, rumor has it, may be entered in the Guinness Book of Records for most consecutive columns making exactly the same point—will likely be surprised by the data in this new survey, or even by the fact that Joe Biden has explicitly repudiated (most recently, in his State of the Union address) the neoliberal economic policies of his three Democratic predecessors. They would also be surprised to learn that among the vast majority of the party’s officeholders, there is no such romance with the cultural left whatsoever.
Biden was right—on the substance and the politics—to repudiate neoliberalism and promote progressive populist economics in its stead. Increasing numbers of his fellow Democrats are doing that as well. In the somewhat amorphous realm of cultural politics, most have also made clear that they’re not for defunding the police, but rather favor police reform and greater civilian oversight. But do I want to hear Biden on gender fluidity? Do I think that’s a key to regaining working-class support?
No. And no. Respectively.
Saddled with an economic perspective that’s actually injurious to most voters, Republicans have a constant need to demonize their opponents, and that demonization, rooted in fabrications and mischaracterizations, will continue no matter how the Democrats respond. Their best response, though, is to champion and enact policies that make voters’ lives better.
